


When the Sun Shone Bright

by unsernameinuse



Series: A Thousand Ways (Zayn/Harry) [4]
Category: One Direction
Genre: Lost Love, M/M, Reunions, zarry reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:15:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25048267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unsernameinuse/pseuds/unsernameinuse
Summary: ...and things didn’t hurt.A chance encounter, a night that changes everything.
Relationships: Zayn Malik/Harry Styles
Series: A Thousand Ways (Zayn/Harry) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1535966
Comments: 12
Kudos: 39





	When the Sun Shone Bright

**Author's Note:**

> DISCLAIMER - no pop stars allowed. I don’t know them and nothing is real but especially not this.
> 
> Title and tag from Brooklyn by Angel Haze.
> 
> Zayn’s POV just came to me like that, idk.

_This should probably feel strange: kissing a man for only the second time, and that man being one you shared a strange and faraway life with some time ago. A lifetime of madness and misery distilled down into five euphoric years. Even then, the two of you never really got along._

_Somehow, it doesn’t._

_Maybe it’s because your younger, more repressed self had always wanted to kiss him just a little bit. Maybe it was because of the way his eyes lit up when he saw you, or maybe it’s just because you’ve always liked tall men with wide smiles and hands stained with ink. It isn’t your fault, so you can’t be held responsible for this weakness._

_Whatever the reason, you’re in a car with blacked out windows and a rolled up partition, speeding down a california highway with his bottom lip between your teeth. It should feel strange, it really should, but it’s impossible to think that way in this moment. You can’t imagine rabid fans or paparazzi, twitter rumors or half aired headlines._

_You just smell him, a scent of expensive cologne he didn’t think twice about, mixing with sweat and body heat to create a heady cloud that draws you into his neck and his hair. Your hands are digging into the meat of his thighs, dragging him closer to you, as if you can merge two people into one._

_You haven’t been with someone like this since she left, but you’re not thinking about that right now._

_“Wow,” he says as he pulls back to breathe. His green eyes are glassy and dazed, his lips flushed and full. You smile at him, and his eyes darken. Then he’s pulling you back in, and you’re lost in the dark and the heat, and glad about it._

Harry Styles wakes up in Zayn’s bed wondering what the hell happens after this.

Zayn is still sleeping, his momentarily long hair an artful mess on the pillow and his perfect face catching the sunlight as if he’s doing a photoshoot in his sleep. He’s undeniably the most beautiful creature Harry’s ever seen, and he can’t help but feel envy and desire all at once. The memory of last nights pleasure rolls over him, makes his heart thump and his blood heat. He craves it all over again, every kiss, every touch, the ecstasy of Zayn on every inch of him. 

“Stop staring,” Zayn mumbles, pulling a pillow over his head. “Go back to sleep.”

So he does.

Zayn has always been stronger than he looks, and sweeter. It’s seems like he’s always smoking, but he never tastes bitter. His tongue is always cinnamon, his skin warm and bright. And his eyes...always brimming with new ideas, deep and wide and full of complexities.

He is an easy man to envy.

He is even easier to love.

_You would think, if you ever had the chance to, that a crush from the bloom of young adulthood would have faded by now. That if it were to come back it might be a nip at the ankles, not lighting striking your blood._

_He’s always been tall, simultaneously delicate and broad, and even more of a presence that you remember. You’ve always wondered at the duality of him, large and presumably imposing, but with an air of fragility belied by the heft of his arms and the span of his chest._

_Despite the fact that he could lift you bodily from bed and drag you anywhere he pleases, he chooses instead to tempt you awake with the smell of gourmet breakfast._

_In the kitchen, he’s laying out eggs and toast and jam and steaming cups of something hot, twirling around with a skillet in his hand and gauzy kimono on his shoulders. He’s singing as he tilts the contents of a skillet onto two plates._

_He is beautiful. Not in a superficial sense of billboards and red carpets, but beautiful like a soft sunset or a small flower blooming in concrete. Something that has escaped notice so many times but now commands your full attention in all its glory._

_“Morning,” you say._

_He catches your eye, smiles, gestures at the food. “Morning,” he says._

_You smile at each other and this big apartment she left cold and empty feels the tiniest bit warm again._

There are years of silence on the kitchen table between them, but nothing in the air besides sunshine as they talk. 

Harry isn’t one for grudges. And besides, he isn’t sure what they might have been fighting about, if they were fighting before. Sometimes years pass in silence. Sometimes things said in anger stay forever in the ink on a magazine page. It happens.

Regardless, the man in front of him is nothing and everything like the boy he used to be. He still has a cigarette inches from his fingers while they eat, but he holds Harry’s gaze with more confidence and frequency. He speaks more easily of his heart now, flowing seamlessly through tough topics and laughter alike. But his laugh still happens like it surprises him and crinkles his whole face into something new and wonderful.

He is still Zayn, whatever anyone else might have to say about that. And Zayn is someone Harry’s heart has always chased, even when he begged it to come back. 

_He has changed. There are new tattoos on his skin, new words in his vocabulary, and he speaks of people you have never met. He is a man with multiple number one albums, with Grammys and exes who are household names._

_Yet somehow he finds a way to fit in your kitchen, in the quieter life you have made for yourself. Maybe he’s always been that way, unmoved by his own enormity, and maybe that’s what draws you to him._

_The longer he stays the farther things fall from the realm of ‘drunken mistake’ and ‘one night stand’. You are two planets orbiting one star made of mutual desire._

_You grin at each other over soap suds as you clean up breakfast, remembering old times out loud and hearing about new days. You bask in each other’s warmth afterward, crushed into the corner of your couch as though the other four sections don’t exist. There is so much to tell him, so much to feel. You are filled with a kind of peace that you’re not sure you’ve ever had before._

_It’s something about the low pull of his voice, about the brush of his hair against your cheek as he tells a long story about his sister. Your arms curl around his waist without your command, and you realize then that you’re now one of those annoying people that says ‘I just knew’. Because in that moment, you_ do _just know._

_Maybe it won’t be today. Maybe he’ll leave and forget to text, maybe he’ll stay but you’ll fight. Maybe there’s already someone else, or you’ll fumble and fall again._

_All you know is that you’re laughing at something that is objectively not funny, that his body fits into yours and his arms feel like home. And no matter what it takes from here on out, you can never let yourself be without him again._

**Author's Note:**

> Please Let me know what you thought 😘


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